Call for nominations: 2nd Annual Femslash Madness Tournament!

Last summer, we held one of our best competitions ever here at AfterEllen: The inaugural Ultimate Femslash Madness Tournament. After several weeks and over a million votes, you narrowed down your favorite femslash couples to a Final Four of Swan Queen, Rizzles, Faberry and The Original Femslash Champions: Xena and Gabrielle. In the end, Quinn and Rachel edged out Jane and Maura to take home the crown.

Slash shipping has long been a part of the lesbian fandom experience, and over the last year, it has gotten even bigger and even better out there on the wide Internet. Everyone from actors to showrunners to my grandmother knows about the slash shipping craze, and all of them throw down fandom slang on the regular. So, we’re going to make our tournament even awesomer. This year, we’re opening up nominations for any non-canonical female-female fanon pairing. That means you can nominate cross-show femslash couples like Fabrastings (Quinn Fabray and Spencer Hastings), pairings who have not explicitly been deemed a couplelike Bering and Wells or Xena and Gabrielle, or regular ol’ femslash couples like Buffy and Faith or Meredith and Cristina. Also, we’re not restricting the nominations to TV. We’re open to movies and books and comic books and musicals and web series’ as well.

The only restriction is the couples have to to be comprised of fictional characters. No real people shipping.

Here’s how the nomination process works: From right this second until this Thursday (July 18) at midnight EST, you can nominate your favorite couples for the tournament. You can list them here in the comments at AfterEllen, or you can nominate them via Twitter or Tumblr. All you have to do is tag your nominations #FemslashOTP. We’ll accept the 32 most popular fanon couples, and voting will begin on Friday morning.

As an added bonus, I’m going to work up an Ultimate Femslash Madness Tournament shipping guide, in which I will highlight the best the Internet has to offer for the top 32 couples. So point us toward your favorite fan fics, fanvids, fan art, photo manips, etc. For each couple, we’ll include links to our favorite fan creations. (You can link us to those things using the #FemalshOTP tag also.)